Category Archives: Afghanistan

As France and Belgium move to expand state power in the aftermath of the Paris attacks, top U.S. officials have renewed a push to defend mass surveillance and dismiss those who challenge it. On Wednesday, FBI Director James Comey said intelligence and law enforcement officials need to have access to encrypted information on smartphones, despite no evidence that the Paris attackers used encryption. Meanwhile, others have used the Paris attacks to criticize NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. In recent days, CIA Director John Brennan has suggested revelations about mass spying have made it harder to find terrorists, while former CIA Director James Woolsey has said Snowden has blood on his hands. “We have not heard such blatant, shameless lying from intelligence and military officials since 2002 and 2003 when they propagandized the country into invading Iraq based on utterly false pretenses,” says The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald, the Pulitzer-winning journalist who exposed NSA mass surveillance based on Snowden’s leaks.

The French secular ideal of laïcité is not a misused noble idea — it is deeply flawed at its roots…
Today laïcité serves as a justification for a variety of things — from banning headscarf-wearing mothers from accompanying their children on school outings to telling Muslim and Jewish schoolchildren that they must eat pork or go hungry.
But laïcité is not simply an idea that has been appropriated by the Right for political or cultural ends; it is also a value claimed by the Left, even the far left…
In 1886 Lafargue published a satire entitled La Religion du capital (The Religion of Capital). He imagined a conference in London with economic and political representatives of European capitalism — Clemenceau, Rothschild, Gladstone, Herbert Spencer, von Moltke, etc. Among those attending were Ferry and Paul Bert, who as education minister had been one of Ferry’s main allies in establishing laïcité. Their concern was to enable the survival of capitalism. And for that, a religion of some sort was required…
Some of the sharpest criticism of laïcité came from the anarchist and syndicalist currents; the anarchist position could be summed up as “neither the church nor the state.” As Sébastien Faure put it, the Christian school was “organised by the Church and for it, while the “école laïque” was “organised by the state and for it.” He counterposed the idea of “the school of the future . . . organised for the child.” André Lorulot put it rather more crudely, calling state schoolteachers “intellectual cops of the capitalist class.”…
Despite some opposing voices, laïcité largely achieved its goal of solidifying a national identity backed by military might…
The traditions of criticism of laïcité persisted after the First World War. The journal Clarté, close to but not entirely controlled by the Communist Party, reported on educational developments in post-revolutionary Russia that might offer an alternative to church or state education. An educational conference held in Moscow in 1919, for instance, dismissed academic neutrality and laïcité as a “mug’s game” (attrape-nigaud) designed to serve the interests of the bourgeoisie…
Today, with the concept being used in the service of Islamophobia, it is especially important to knock laïcité down from its elevated status. And that requires understanding laïcité not as a noble ideal that has been misinterpreted and distorted, but as deeply flawed from the outset.

Many young people in Paris were innocent victims of the Nov. 13 attack, but that doesn’t mean that the French imperialist state is innocent. While the 1789 French Revolution raised the idealistic slogans of liberty, equality and fraternity, French imperialism, which developed from that bourgeois revolution, has a bloody history across the world…
When imperialist France had just emerged from German occupation after World War II, the Arab and Berber peoples began carrying out mass demonstrations and uprisings in Algeria against French colonial rule. To suppress that rebellion, for several days French troops and police, acting on orders from the French president issued on May 8, 1945, massacred as many as 45,000 Algerians who peacefully demonstrated in the cities of Setif, Guelma and Kherrata. The French occupiers killed as many as a million Algerians trying to hold onto that nation, until the people finally won their liberation in 1962.
In 1947, French colonial troops slaughtered 89,000 people to “pacify” a rebellion in Madagascar, an African island in the Indian Ocean. During the long French war in Indochina, the French military killed many more Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians and some Chinese until French imperialism was finally driven out in 1954.
Even in Paris itself, on Oct. 17, 1961, French police opened fire on a demonstration of 30,000 Algerians, killing between 70 and 300 people …
This history of imperialist military intervention continues. French jets are bombing today in Syria and Iraq, along with the U.S.-led “coalition.” French jets opened the air war against Libya in 2011, leading NATO’s barbaric destruction of that country.

It’s a wretched yet predictable ritual after each new terrorist attack: Certain politicians and government officials waste no time exploiting the tragedy for their own ends. The remarks on Monday by John Brennan, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, took that to a new and disgraceful low…
It is hard to believe anything Mr. Brennan says.

The Intercept has obtained a cache of secret documents detailing the inner workings of the U.S. military’s assassination program in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia. The documents, provided by a whistleblower, offer an unprecedented glimpse into Obama’s drone wars.

The novelty of Bernie Sanders has long been his adoption of the term “democratic socialist” to describe his political beliefs. On the presidential campaign trail, by way of definition, he’s repeatedly pointed to European countries with relatively robust welfare states.
On Thursday, in a major campaign address, he turned back stateside. Sanders cast himself not as the heir of Eugene Debs — a portrait of whom hangs in his congressional office — but of Franklin Roosevelt. In short, for Sanders, democratic socialism means New Deal liberalism.

More than 40,000 workers are now on strike, forcing three leading platinum and gold producers to halt their operations. …
The Marikana massacre was the worst act of police brutality since the days of apartheid. Some 270 miners arrested during the assault were then charged with complicity in the deaths of their 34 colleagues under the notorious apartheid-era “common purpose law”.
Although the charges have been dropped for now, the latest operation has underscored that the interests of the same multinational and South African firms that profited under apartheid remain intact. The Regulation of Gatherings Act now being enforced by the ANC was notoriously employed by the apartheid government. …
[T]he ANC and its partners in the NUM and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) have as little legitimacy as the white minority regime the ANC replaced 18 years before.
Comprising a thin layer of wealthy and corrupt black officials, they have been the sole beneficiaries of the post-apartheid policy of “black economic empowerment”.

… Manila is turning back on almost two decades of relative strategic independence, beginning with the Philippine Senate’s refusal in 1991 to extend the US’s lease at Subic Bay naval base, a military presence nationalistic lawmakers then assailed as a vestige of colonialism and affront to national sovereignty.
Fast forward to the present, Manila is now actively, if not desperately, courting US military support vis-a-vis China.

GLEN FORD: … [W]e at Black Agenda Report have for some time been saying that Obama is not the lesser of evils, but the more effective evil. And we base that on his record and also on his rhetoric at the convention. So, we would prefer to talk about what history-making events have gone down under his presidency.
He’s, first of all, created a model for austerity, a veritable model, with his deficit reduction commission. He’s introduced preventive detention, a law for preventive detention. He’s expanded the theaters of war in drone wars, and he’s made an unremitting assault on international law. And I think that possibly the biggest impact, his presidency—and I’m not talking about his—all this light and airy stuff from the convention, but actual deeds—I think probably what will go down as his biggest contribution to history is a kind of merging of the banks and the state, with $16 trillion being infused into these banks, into Wall Street, under his watch, and the line between Wall Street and the federal government virtually disappearing.

The police massacre of striking miners at Marikana is a watershed for post-apartheid South Africa and for the international class struggle. It demonstrates in the starkest form imaginable that the perspective of “black empowerment” and the “National Democratic Revolution” providing the basis for overcoming economic and social oppression has failed utterly. The central lesson of Marikana is that the fundamental division within society is class, not race.

Around a third of young children in southern Afghanistan are acutely malnourished, with a level of deprivation similar to that found in famine zones, a government survey has found, despite the hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid that has been poured into the region. …
“What’s shocking is that this is really very high by global standards,” said Michael Keating, deputy head of the UN mission in Afghanistan. “This is the kind of malnutrition you associate with Africa and some of the most deprived parts of the world, not with an area that has received so much international attention and assistance.”

From 2000-04 the Israeli military demolished around 1,700 homes in Rafah, leaving about 17,000 people homeless, according to the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem.
Corrie was one of a group of around eight international activists acting as human shields against the demolitions. According to witness statements made at the time and evidence given in court, she clambered on top of a mound of earth in the path of an advancing Caterpillar bulldozer.
“She was standing on top of a pile of earth,” fellow activist and eyewitness Richard Purssell, from Brighton, said at the time. “The driver cannot have failed to see her. As the blade pushed the pile, the earth rose up. Rachel slid down the pile. It looks as if her foot got caught. The driver didn’t slow down; he just ran over her. Then he reversed the bulldozer back over her again.”

Concern ruling will allow Israel to exploit ‘legal black hole’ and avoid responsibility for its actions. Human rights organisations have warned of a “dangerous precedent” following an Israeli court’s dismissal of a civil lawsuit over the death of US activist Rachel Corrie, which stated that Israel could not be held responsible because its army was engaged in a combat operation. …
Human Rights Watch said the ruling contravened international law, which is intended to protect non-combatants in war zones, and set “a dangerous precedent”. “The idea that there can be no fault for killing civilians in a combat operation flatly contradicts Israel’s international legal obligations to spare civilians from harm during armed conflict and to credibly investigate and punish violations by its forces,” said Bill van Esveld, a senior Middle East researcher at HRW.

At the May 6 polls, the radical left-wing coalition Syriza becomes the second “party” in numbers of voters as it moves from 4.5% at the previous elections (2009) to 16.8% (52 MPs instead of 13). It is the first party in the major agglomerations and among people aged 18-35.
The Socialist Party (PASOK) lost 2/3 of the votes it had received in 2009 (from 44% to 13.2%, a loss of 119 MPs, from 160 to 41!). PASOK pays ‘cash on the nail’ their rigorous austerity programme and subjection to the ‘Troika’ and big private business interests.
New Democracy, the main right-wing party that entered the government in December 2011, still comes first but with an enormously reduced score down from 33.5% to 18.9%. However, it gains seats because of an iniquitous disposition that grants 50 seats as a bonus to the party that pooled most votes. So while it lost 40% in votes New Democracy wins 17 MPs (from 91 to 108).

‘No permanent military base in Afghanistan’? The reality is that the U.S. bases will be “Afghan” bases, but housing as many as 20,000 U.S. “trainers“ and Special Ops forces, actually numbering more than the U.S. troops currently stationed at the controversial Futenma airbase in Okinawa, Japan, and double the number that will remain there after the troop withdrawal recently (and heatedly) negotiated with Japan.

Two Palestinian hunger strikers’ lives are in danger, as the Israeli Supreme Court has delayed ruling on the appeal against their detention without charge or trial. Other administrative detainees on hunger strike are still denied access to independent doctors.

Each day since April 17, scores of Palestinian prisoners have joined a hunger strike that officials say now counts more than 1,500 participants. And on Thursday, the Palestinian Authority’s minister of detainees said that if Israel did not yield to their demands for improved prison conditions, the remaining 3,200 would soon join in. The two longest-striking prisoners, who have gone without food for 66 days, appeared in wheelchairs before Israel’s Supreme Court on Thursday morning, pleading for their release from what is known here as administrative detention — incarceration without formal charges. One of them, Bilal Diab, 27, fainted during the hearing.

Three brothers from the burglar-plagued West Bank village of Kafr Ramun wake up in the middle of the night and spot two suspicious figures near their home. They ask them to identify themselves, but the suspicious characters keep moving toward their house. The brothers try to chase off the intruders with sticks and kitchen knives, but the intruders open fire on the men with handguns they have kept hidden. Only the next day do the brothers discover that the two suspicious figures were undercover operatives of the Israel Defense Forces’ Duvdevan unit, disguised as Arabs, who were soon joined by a large IDF force. The soldiers fired no less than 11 bullets point-blank at the brothers; some continued to fire after the men lay wounded on the ground. The wounded men say they were left to bleed for almost an hour without medical attention. A soldier kicked one of the wounded brothers in the head. The outcome: the younger brother, Rashad Shawakhah, 28, died of his wounds and the two others, Anwar and Akram, were severely wounded.

Watching unarmed crowds achieve tentative victories against entrenched, U.S.-backed regimes produced a kind of giddiness on this side of the ocean—an otherworldly feeling that, somehow, the foreign outposts of the U.S. empire might suddenly disintegrate by popular demand. But now, the U.S. naval war machine lies off the coast of Libya, and it is time for the American anti-war movement—such as it is—to remember who is the biggest enemy of peace on planet Earth: U.S. imperialism.

It is certainly not Muamar Khadafi [معمر القذافي‎ Mu‘ammar al-Qaḏḏāfī], no matter what you think of him. And the conflict that is raging in Libya seems in important ways very much unlike the events in Tunisia and Egypt. The anti-Khadafi forces were armed from almost the very beginning of the uprising and included elements of the military. Unlike the opponents of Egypt’s President Mubarak, we know very little about who these rebel Libyans are—except that they have been getting lots of material help from the Americans and the French and other Europeans.

The richest 70 of the 2,987 [NPC] members have a combined wealth of 493.1 billion yuan ($75.1 billion), … By comparison, the wealthiest 70 people in the 535-member U.S. House and Senate, who represent a country with about 10 times China’s per-capita income, had a maximum combined wealth of $4.8 billion…

The presence of billionaires in the Congress, which is the highest state legislative body and meets to approve government economic and fiscal plans, is one consequence of the Communist Party’s opening to capitalists to join it a decade ago. The step now risks hampering efforts to tackle inequality, such as higher taxes on upper-income earners, financial disclosures and real-estate levies, said Huang Jing of Singapore National University.

“The biggest problem to passage of the property tax is the People’s Congress,” said Huang, a professor at the Lee Kuan Yew Center for Public Policy. “How can you expect those rich people to represent the interests of people who need help?” …

Wen, 68, said Feb. 27 that the government would push to narrow a growing wealth gap which Credit Suisse Group AG said in an August report was at levels not seen outside of Africa. …

Li Zhaoxing, a former foreign minister who is now the NPC’s spokesman, said he had no idea that so many delegates were richer than the wealthiest U.S. lawmaker.

To begin with, combat in Iraq is not over, and we should not uncritically repeat suggestions that it is, even if they come from senior officials. The situation on the ground in Iraq is no different today than it has been for some months. Iraqi security forces are still fighting Sunni and al-Qaida insurgents. … As for U.S. involvement, it also goes too far to say that the U.S. part in the conflict in Iraq is over. … 50,000 American troops remain in country. Our own reporting on the ground confirms that some of these troops, especially some 4,500 special operations forces, continue to be directly engaged in military operations.

There is no indication that the North Korean state wants to end economic exchange with the outside world. However, stage one and stage two of the currency reforms reveals the strong determination to return to the driver’s seat and to be in full control of the domestic economy as well as of foreign economic relations. The vision of the planners in Pyongyang is a domestic population that is supplied via state distribution and rationing, and foreign trade and investment that are channeled through the Ministry of Foreign Trade, the Foreign Trade Bank, and the Foreign Investment Bank rather than via single ministries or even, beware, single enterprises.

K. wrote: Oz is a colonial backwater like Canada…I remember when the CIA got rid of Whitlam i believe…Billiton (aka Broken Hill) is the largest mining corp in the world about to take over potashcorp, world’s largest potash producer and the second and third largest producer of nitrogen and phosphate.
Rachel Pannett: Shadow of Ouster Hangs Over Australian Vote (Wall Street Journal)

The important constituency here is liberals, who duly rise to the challenge of unpleasant disclosures of imperial crimes. In the wake of scandals such as those revealed at Abu Ghraib, or in the Wikileaks files, they are particularly eager to proclaim that they “can take it” – i.e., endure convincing accounts of monstrous tortures, targeted assassinations by US forces, obliteration of wedding parties or entire villages, and emerge with ringing affirmations of the fundamental overall morality of the imperial enterprise. This was very common in the Vietnam war and repeated in subsequent imperial ventures such the sanctions and ensuing attack on Iraq, and now the war in Afghanistan. Of course in the case of Israel it’s an entire way of life for a handsome slice of America’s liberals.
What does end wars? One side is annihilated, the money runs out, the troops mutiny, the government falls, or fears it will. With the U.S. war in Afghanistan none of these conditions has yet been met.

To cut to the chase, no election in Haiti, and no candidate in those elections, will be considered legitimate by the majority of Haiti’s population, unless it includes the full and fair participation of the Fanmi Lavalas Party of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Fanmi Lavalas is unquestionably the most popular party in the country, yet the “international community,” led by the United States, France, and Canada, has done everything possible to undermine Aristide and Lavalas, overthrowing him twice by military coups in 1991 and 2004, and banishing Aristide, who now lives in South Africa with his family, from the Americas.

[South Korean] 1st Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Shin Kak-soo summoned Russian Ambassador to South Korea Konstantin Vnukov to the Foreign Ministry on July 4 to express “astonishment” at Russia’s investigation findings because the findings were a complete contradiction to the South Korean government’s announcement.

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About us

Beijing International Peace Vigil was started in March 2003 by a group of foreigners living in Beijing, China who want to work together to build lasting peace, security and justice for everyone throughout the world. Our motivation to form the group was our shared opposition to the US-initiated war on Iraq.
However, our commitment goes beyond opposing war to the need for everyone to build a better world. We believe that one important way to build peace and justice is to defend and strengthen existing global institutions, especially the UN family, as well as to build new institutions, both formal and informal.
A second essential way is to work for an alternative internationalist form of globalization as opposed to today’s corporate version.
The group meets every week to discuss related issues and from time to time invites guest speakers to address the group. The group is devising its own ideas on United Nations reform, a Millennium Goal for Peace and an alternative form of globalization. It seeks to link up with others thinking along similar lines to encourage debate of these issues and help create a force for change to which governments will have to listen.
As one of our members said, there is a second superpower in the world: it is the voices and action of the peoples throughout the world working together for peace and justice.